Today was another travel day. Other than taking a couple of quick snapshots out the window, the camera stayed in the bag.

Start: Alexandria, VA
Finish: Cheltham, MA
Miles Driven: 460

States traversed across: Virginia, DC, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Mass., New Hampshire

Spending the evening with a friend from graduate school and his family. Very adorable daughters.

Today started off with an early wake-up call of 4:30 to get to DC in time for sunrise. Sky was pretty much overcast and, hence, the shooting left something to be desired. At least I only drove 5 miles today (used Metro in/out of DC).

Most of the day was spent doing various museums. Visited the Art Gallery, Natural History, American History, and the Air & Space Museums in the span of 4 hours or so. Interesting to see what has changed and what hasn’t since the last time I visited 6 years ago. Kinda of a tough day, though, as they were all packed with school kids from the DC area. Shooting the monuments early on and only have deal with joggers was much more enjoyable…

Also went to the Newseum, which is just off of the National Mall. Pretty decent museum and a pretty fair view of journalism up to the present day. I’d recommend it for most other cities, but given the quality of the Smithsonian’s and their price (free), it’s hard to say that it is a must see here. (Admission is $20). Saw a few representatives from the Nascar Hall of Fame checking out the place. Hope Nascar is more reasonable.

Didn’t bother trying to shoot in the evening. A pretty decent thunderstorm headed through the area starting at 4:30 and I was already exhausted.

Start: Charlotte, NC
End: Washington DC
Miles Driven: 425
Photos Taken: 632

Today was the first day of my summer “vacation” after my last day of work yesterday. I spent last night packing and making final arrangements for the trip this morning.

Finally got out of the house around 8:45 and headed to Salisbury to visit my son and my in-laws who are watching him for the next week while Tina has work and guard duty. It really was nice seeing him and the toughest part of this trip will be away from him and Tina. He’s doing well with the grandparents and they are keeping him busy. I didn’t tell him “exactly” how long I’m planing on being gone, other than saying “I’ll see you son.” Probably not completely honest, but I’m not really sure how much/what a 3 1/2 year old can understand and comprehend.

I then drove up to Quantico and visit the US Marine National Museum. Extremely impressive facility. They had a couple of rooms centered around the Korean and Vietnam wars to simulate the experience of being there. Very sobering.

Next, I drove up to Arlington National Cemetary. Visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and saw the changing of the guard. Large veteran group was also on hand to witness the ceremony and that’s always a good experience to see that. Few people can really comprehend the sacrifice of those that came before us.

Then, I went over to the Marine Corp National Monument (Iwo Jima) statue for the Tuesday Sunset Parade. I had intentionally moved the start of the trip up a day to attend. Very impressive display from the marines stationed here in D.C. Afterwards, headed back through Arlington to the parking lot – very nice experience as the place was devoid of visitors and I could just soak in the experience of what it really means to be there.

Finally – headed back to DC to scout a parking spot for tomorrow morning near the monuments. The earliest spots open up around the monuments is 6:00 AM, which is a bit late for sunrise. I’ll just take the metro over in the morning instead.

I’ll post pictures as I get a chance.

Canon’s introducing new Firmware to 5D Mark II to give it full manual control in movie mode – http://www.usa.canon.com/app/emails/eosmay095dmii/?WT.mc_id=EM0905EO04002.

The manual mode was sorely missing from the camera, causing those who wanted to shoot video and control their aperture settings to find 3-party lenses to mount on to their camera bodies. This is going to make it a lot easier to utilize this feature. It’s still going to be non-trivial for the novice user given the need to put it on a tripod an manual focus. An the “indie” film buffs will whine still as to why it shoots at 30fps rather than 24….

Firmware is available next week (2 Jun 2009). I’ll wait a few days before installing, though.

Recently, I was going through my photo collection within Lightroom and came across this image I took a couple of years ago at the Monterey Aquarium. It’s not necessarily good or bad, but now that’s two years later, I’m realizing that there are some very quick changes that I can do to enhance it:

So, here’s how I re-processed it:

1. Used Lightroom 2.3 instead of 1.x. The improved processing engine (esp for noise) made an immediate difference.
2. Next, I brought it into Photoshop CS3 and applied Imagenomic’s Noiseware at default settings. (At a recent workshop, I really picked up how important it is to use noise reduction early in the process as it minimizes the noise artifacts from being magnified during later processing.
3. Third, I cloned out the tentacles and jellyfish along the left hand side. I also went through and cleaned up various spots (either junk on the window, my lens, my sensor, or “stuff” in the water). This comes back to looking at what’s the subject of the photo – which is the primary jellyfish swimming down from the upper left. Once that’s identified, subtract what’s not needed to simplify the image. I choose to keep the other jelly fish in the background to give it a sense of depth. I also like how the curve of the background jellyfish “frames” the subject.
4. Finally, I sharpened the image with a high-pass sharpen action

So here’s the final version now:

Your thoughts?

I spent last week taking a photography workshop in the North Carolina Outer Banks.

Although parts of the workshop left something to be desired, overall it was a great experience.  I got to meet some new friends (John, Scott, Joseph, Davis) as well renew a friendship (Bart) with someone I took a workshop with last year.   (I’ll talk about the workshop experience in a later post).

Below a Google map of various places I’ve discovered to photography whether it be through the DLWS Workshop, the Carolinas’ Nature Photographers Association (CNPA), or my own research:

View Outer Banks Photography Locations in a larger map

In addition to these locations, there’s always other standard things to be found along the coast: (some of these items are more desirable than others)

• Beach – people, crowds, kite flying, fishing
• “Culture” – tourist traps, minature golf courses,
• Wave abstracts

In the first stage of the centennial Giro d’Italia, it was basically 3 american-related teams that topped the results: Team Columbia-Highroad, Garmin-Slipstream, and Astana.  Although, this is only a small stage, it continues to show how far americans have come in this traditionally european dominated sport.

For those in the United States, the race can followed live on the Internet on Universal Sports at http://www.universalsports.com

I’ve also used Cycling News’ live coverage to follow races – (http://www.cyclingnews.com).

Recieved an “interesting” credit card offer from Visa (or some supplier there of), for the “Black Visa Card”.

Carbon-fiber, conceirge services, and high credit limits available to the just %1 of the U.S. population eligible to have the card.

The fine print: $495 annual feed.  

Just like all of the other credit card offers I receive, this one quickly found the trash.

Yes, but not nearly as much as the report $4.5 billion would led you to believe.  Here are their one-time earnings used to make that number:

• $1.9 billion pretax gain on the sale of shares in China Construction Bank
• $2.2 billion from an adjustment to the value of structured notes at Merrill

Things not mentioned in the headlines:

• Credit card division lost $1.8 billion
• Mortgage division lost $500 million
• $6.4 billion added to reserves to cover future losses

Who’s next up in this game?   From this morning’s performance in the stock market, investors aren’t happy playing…